Several other people in the department have started using WebAssign to handle homework assignments in the introductory class, because it provides a way to assign and grade daily homework without forcing the faculty member to do a ton of grading (the college has a policy against student graders). WebAssign takes textbook problems, randomizes the numbers slightly so each student sees something different, and automatically grades the answers as students type them in on the web.
I'm a little hesitant to use it (I'm teaching the class in question next term), for two reasons: one is that there's some extra cost to the students (they need to pay something like $15 to register for the system), but the main reason is that I've been using Blackboard for a while now.
Don't get me wrong-- Blackboard has some nice features, otherwise I wouldn't continue using it. I like the fact that it password-protects my notes and handouts without my having to deal with ITS. I like the fact that it automatically generates course rosters and email lists, so I don't have to worry about whether a given student ever looks at their default campus email accounts, or only reads their mail at "RoxxorGod8675309@hotmail.com".
But the day-to-day use of Blackboard is just a miserable grind, due to all the excess clicking they require for no good reason.
For example, if I want to add a PDF of my lecture notes to a folder, I go to the Control Panel for the class, then the relevant content area, then the folder in question, and click "Add Item." This gives me a screen where I can upload a file and give it a name and some explanatory text. Then I click "Submit."
After submitting, Blackboard goes to an otherwise blank screen containing a note saying that the item was successfully added. I have to click "OK" (the only option on the screen) to get back to the folder where I added the item.
It's like this for everything. Every individual action gets its own confirmation page, every time. Some actions get an extra special dialog box along the way-- if I want to change the file associated with a specific item, for example, I click through to a screen that's exactly like the "Add Item" screen, and click "Remove" next to a particular file. Which brings up a dialog box saying "This action is permanent and cannot be undone," which I have to approve before it sends me to the stupid confirmation page again. I have to "OK" the confirmation and then click back to the Item page to add the new file.
This is especially annoying at the moment, because the system is apparently overloaded, and every fifth click or so something times out. Which means I get to reload the page again, in order to see the stupid confirmation page again.
These aren't major gripes, by any stretch, but they pile up. Every action on Blackboard takes half again as long as it should, thanks to all the waiting for confirmation pages and extra mouse clicks required to do anything. Irritation at the system just builds up, until I stop updating the site as frequently as I ought to, just because each new confirmation screen makes me want to punch my monitor.
A colleague was showing me WebAssign yesterday, and while the system has some nice features, it also looks like it has Blackboard's two-clicks-for-every-action problem. Actually, it might be slightly worse, because it seems to spawn new browser windows every time you click on a link.
The idea of closing five extra tabs every time I need to do something just doesn't make me fired up to use WebAssign. Put that together with the extra cost to students, and I start to wonder whether it's really worth the bother.
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There's apparently an article in a recent Inside Higher Ed that Blackboard is changing. Geeky Mom has a comment about it here
Mastering Physics is much easier to run, much more plug and play. And it has more pedagogical features. However, Mastering Physics also limits your options on how to grade things (yes, there is a whole screen with grading options, but try changing sig figs tolerances, or try making hints penalty-free without also making them extra credit, etc.). WebAssign is better that way.
Plus, Mastering Physics is haunted by a ghost bug. Students are insisting that they entered the correct answer, the system said "wrong", they tried several more times, and finally gave up and the answer that the system gave was the one they entered on their first try. I've never seen a record of this, that correct first answer never shows up in the detailed records that Mastering Physics keeps. However, a few students (some of them even conscientious) swear that this is happening.
I keep telling them that I need screenshots to prove this to tech support. I need a screenshot of the system saying "No, F=ma (or whatever) is not correct!" But they never give me that screenshot. They try several more answers and then swear that their first one was not recorded in the log even though Mastering Physics said it's wrong.
This request for documentation may backfire on me if somebody with Photoshop skillz decides to doctor a screenshot.
I don't really believe in the existence of this bug, it sounds a bit too convenient, but I can't quite dismiss it either. If nothing else, I'm untenured, and telling students flat out that they are mistaken about what happened to them is a good way to alienate them and get bad evaluations.
When I did my undergrad degree (2004-2008), one of my Electrical Engineering courses used Web CT Vista (similar to blackboard), that had this sort of online testing, with variations on the numbers in each problem. It worked alright, but the biggest problem was that the formula you gave the software to compute the answer (from the perturbed problem parameters) had to be linear. We had three tries to get the problem correct, and were told the correct answer after a wrong guess, so after the second time you could simply extrapolate the correct answer based on the known correct answers for your first two guesses.
Also, compared to tuition, $15 is a drop in the bucket. I took a couple of humanities classes, and they required a $30 "clicker" that was basically an infrared remote control, that was used for attendance and to answer "mini-quiz" questions in class. It was pretty lame.
A few of my classes have started to use Sakai, an open source CMS. So far I'm not impressed. I think anyone who knows how to make a good CMS doesn't want to because it is such a boring task. I have YET to see one I actually enjoy using.
You need to understand that Clickers are interactive pedagogy, and hence if you don't use them you are a bad, evil person who doesn't care about student learning. I went to a great Physics Education workshop for new faculty where I learned that traditional teaching is evil and horrible, and the only way to become a good person was to use newer, more progressive materials. Fortunately, the people giving the workshop all had some books and technologies to sell. So my soul can be saved.
Seriously, the stuff has some advantages, but the community pushing all that stuff knows how to come across like a Campus Crusade for Christ member selling used cars and herbal remedies. They delayed my clicker experiment by an entire year, because it took that long to get over my instinctive revulsion.
I agree that Blackboard is annoying!
As far as the fees go:
Large introductory courses of the sort that lend themselves to the use of student graders or robo-graders are net money-makers for a college.
Colleges that permit the use of student graders presumably don't charge the students in courses that use such graders any extra fee for the "privilege" of having their homework graded by student graders rather than by the faculty member.
So why should students pay anything extra for the privilege of having their homework graded by a webassign robo-grader rather than by the faculty member?
An alternative to consider to grading homework: collect the homework and grade it on a "good-faith effort" basis (Sat/Unsat or check+/check/check-), but use the college-owned "clickers" to give in-class "homework quizzes" on a few questions that are structurally similar to the homework at the beginning of each class.
The university I attended (BS in physics) has been using their own homemade WebAssign type system for at least 6 or 7 years. Everyone gets the same homework packet for the semester and each individual gets computer generated numbers for one or two key values in each problem. (Initial velocity, mass, angles, etc.) They enter their answers in to a simple website (no extra clicking required) and get the results back instantly. They have an option to rework problems they missed for partial credit (I think).
For the first 3 weeks of every semester, the students hate it. This is only used for those large sections of basic, pre-med physics. (And I spent many hours employed to help those students with their homework.) After a few weeks they figure out the system and how to carry all the significant figures in their calculators to avoid rounding problems. And then they quit complaining.
But my personal opinion is that it doesn't really do any good. If the object is to prevent cheating, I suppose it would stop students from stealing answers from a good and honest student. But if groups are colluding to cheat, all they have to do is re-enter a few numbers in a calculator and it's not really any different than before. The vast majority of students work in groups anyway, and get help from friends and nothing much is gained by giving them all different numbers, IMO.
I also do not like having students pay for WebAssign (so, I make it optional). But don't think blackboard doesn't cost the students also. It is just indirect. Blackboard is a GIANT money hole at our university. Its too bad that so many faculty think that blackboard IS THE INTERNET or we could move to something free and better, like moodle.
Maybe I'm just a curmudgeon, but I find it offensive to be required to pay an extra fee to some third-party commercial organization for permission to do my homework...
(I always thought WebCT was pretty awful to use, too - maybe Moodle will be able to take its place).
As a student I've dealt with Mastering Physics, Blackboard and WebCT. All of them are cruddy systems that they need to go and throw out the window and rebuild it for the 21st century. But that will never happen unless some small startup wants to tackle that problem.
Online problem sets were probably the thing that turned me off most about freshman physics. We'd have some 20 problems a week. They'd be the same basic problems for everyone, but with different numbers. You'd get 10 tries for each problem, with it telling you each time whether you got it right or wrong.
What I disliked so much was the binary nature of the feedback. You'd do the work out the algebra with a bunch of people, with everyone getting the same final equation, plug in the numbers, and about half the people would get it right. After getting the wrong answer, you'd immediately try doing a bunch of tricks to your numerical answer (multiplying by negative 1, converting from m to cm, etc) that would have no basis from the problem, but you'd try it anyways, because it worked often enough. Either way, this lead to you getting wrong answers for right reasons and right answers for wrong reasons, without any real feedback to tell you which was which. I felt that they did a good job of teaching you how to get the correct answer on online problem sets, but a poor job of teaching you physics.
Although I know it's a pain to grade things by hand, the times when problem sets were, I feel like I learned a lot more because you were able to see which parts were done correctly, which parts were done incorrectly and where there were simply problems with calculations.
I'm a chemistry professor and often teach general chemistry. At my school this year we are using a system called OWL (Online Web-based Learning) which is run by the textbook publisher (Cengage/Thomson-Brooks/Cole, I guess). It works really well, and after a couple weeks the students, on net, like it a lot. It has lots of help and tutoring built into each problem and randomizes numbers and reactions where appropriate. Before I started working here, some of the professors here focus-grouped the various online homework systems available and OWL was found to be the only one that wasn't a horrendous craphole.
We use an open source system, and I find that it works quite well ... for me. (You know how to find me if you want to know more.) There is no magic to the system. For it to work, it has to be an integral part of the course and how you teach the course. Students and former students who use other systems (one for math, the other being Mastering Physics at nearby university) have likes and dislikes for all of them. What they don't like about mine is that it gives limited hints. Once they get over the "random guess" approach, what they like about it is that it gives limited hints.
They, or their friends, or me, or one of our student tutors has to find their mistake ... and learning to find your own mistakes is a crucial skill that few students have learned. They also learn to do homework until it is right, not just to turn in some crap for credit, which also has its value. By the way, I use it in classes that are not all that big, and I do collect some homework or in-class exercises once we get into the serious physics.
To #11, it is more than a pain to grade homework by hand. It is worthless when you see that you are grading 5 solutions submitted by 25 students. Once I figured out the "copy tree", I'd sometimes write "See comment on the paper you copied from". Why explain an error to someone who didn't make the error? That is a waste of all of our time.
I'm not so sanguine as to assume they don't copy equations for the on-line homework. I know they do. And, just like the regular homework, the copiers fail the exam. The difference is, I waste less time on the copiers by only assigning regular homework when there is something worth looking at. The web is for the drill they all need to do if they want to learn how to use their calculators for the first time in their lives.
You should also be aware that if the online homework comes from any of the most popular intro texts, there are PDFs of instructor solution manuals floating around. It's unfortunate and it only ends up hurting them on exams, but there's hundreds of thousands of people in Physics 101 around the country and some of them are pretty resourceful in gaming the system. And once the files are out they pretty quickly become ubiquitous.
There's always Moodle, unless your school is too regressive to consider open source, even with paid support, optional hosting, yadda yadda.
I just ended 6+ years administering Blackboard for a small (4000 FTE) college and I can honestly say it is the worst application I've ever managed in a decade of being a sysadmin working on large-scale interactive web systems. Blackboard is the only company on my hostile vendor list; words like "incompetent" and "unethical" and "anti-competitive" barely scratch the surface in describing their business practices.
The gradebook has never worked right, the sysadmin side of product is pure hell, and the underlying technology is an obsolescent dog's breakfast of Perl and Java; a bloated unstable craptasm of epic proportions.
That said, the best advice I can muster is to determine your institution's needs, find an open system that can be extended or modified to fit those needs, and spend the money on one person/year to customize it and support it. You'll need someone to do that whether you build, buy, or pay to have the software hosted and provided your IT department actually walks the walk when claiming that the educational mission comes first. While not perfect, our campus web team, helpdesk/training team, and core IT group did a first-rate job supporting faculty, staff, and students, at least when the Marketing Department wasn't taking over and destroying everything in their path (morons.)
The problem with learning management systems is mostly intractable, being mostly due to software-purchase-by-committee, risk-averse and easily-duped university management, and the calcified resistance to change among the faculty (if, in fact, adoption of the LMS exceeds more than 20-30%.) Product offerings are either DIY toolkits (Sakai), "80% solutions" (Moodle), and varying degrees of expensive, non-functional shite like Blackboard. This leads me to question whether a learning management system is even possible to express as a turnkey solution. You may in fact be better off with decentralized and bespoke systems.
"Catch my Web2.0 Webinar on Learning Management Systems and the New Pedagogy on Second Life, Thursday at 9pm shortly after Hell(tm) freezes over." :)
On copying:
I have no illusions about this. I know people are copying. I think that having to at least copy a formula and plug into it is ever so slightly more educational than copying a number.
However, for those who want to learn, Mastering Physics and other systems with hints and do-overs offer a lot of benefit. Finding out that you made a mistake and hunting and hunting until you find it can be beneficial. It beats not finding out until a week later, when you're already on to the next assignment.
So it's like any other educational tool: Those who don't want to learn will find a way to not learn. Those who do want to learn can use it to the fullest and get a lot of benefit. These things offer more benefits than some of the alternatives and (to be quite blunt) they make certain aspects of my life easier. So I use them.
Regarding Blackboard:
I know nothing about the administrator's perspective. I have to admit that I don't use many bells and whistles. There are probably less expensive tools for doing the things I want to do with it. However, it always works for me for the things I want to do, and the things I want to do are beneficial to me and my students. So I don't quite get the "non-functional" characterization.
If open source alternatives like Moodle are so much better, why do people buy Blackboard? I know why I use it: Because it's what my institution supports. If my institution supported Moodle or whatever, I'd presumably find a way to use that, and if it's so much better than we'd all be better off. So why do so many institutions use Blackboard?
I am a student. I have to pay $63.80 per year per class for the privilege of turning in my homework.
I also pay an average of $150 per primary textbook (and yes, these are often used books, except in the onerous cases when the publisher suddenly updates a book then ships it out 2 days before my class begins).
I pay an average of $39.95 per lab manual per class (and since I'm a science major, there's a lot of classes). I then pay an additional $21.95 per class for a required lab notebook that consists of 100 pages of carbon paper with our school's logo stamped on the cover.
I find no benefit to WebAssign. Please consider the fact that not only would your students be forced to pay a fee to turn in homework, but they are also being forced to pay many more fees than just tuition. WebAssign and textbook publishers' companion websites for books are perhaps the worst offenders because you are paying a fee for something that expires. You are renting the privilege to do homework.
Webassign is the best single tool I have found for teaching high school kids physics. My kids do there homework. repeatedly attempt the problems, use the textbook to help them learn to do the problems, and I can see which problems give them the most trouble. Choose an online textbook for your class -- and save them the cost of buying one. This way the problems are keyed to the online text -- and it cost less than a paper copy with webassign included! It is not about grading problems or your laziness in building assignments. It is about kids learning the material and though this is the answer to it all by any stretch of the imagination -- it is part of good teaching. Blackbord I have no idea about.
But moodle is an excellent course management tool that allows me plenty of freedom to build my class information and delivery of all manner of resources. It also allows me to have students turn in materials online easily. I have used WEBCT as a student a number of times and if the systems I have seen from my professors are any indication -- moodle is much better from the student side as well, or my professors are just terrible at using it to build a decent page for their class!
I find no benefit to WebAssign. Please consider the fact that not only would your students be forced to pay a fee to turn in homework, but they are also being forced to pay many more fees than just tuition.